One of the things i always wanted to try (and it seems many of you wanted that as well judging by the many emails i received when i first mentioned this) was to test the same exact hard disk drive with both SATA II and SATA III connectivity to see if there were any real gains at all between both models. Of course as you all know it's not very easy to come across two versions (SATA II/III) of the same exact HDD so it was pure luck when i stumbled on the SATA II version of the latest Ultrastar 7K4000 4TB enterprise class HDD from Hitachi GST (HGST now) roughly one month ago. Back then however i didn't have the SATA III version in my hands so this comparison was left unfinished until i did and that time has come.

HGST, a Western Digital company, is a market leader in enterprise hard disk drives and develops advanced hard disk drives, enterprise-class solid state drives, and external storage solutions and services that are used by large and sophisticated technology companies to store, preserve and manage data. HGST storage solutions have a reputation for quality, reliability and innovation. Our drives are trusted by the world’s high-transactional enterprises, Internet services companies, creative professionals, and consumer electronics and automotive system manufacturers to store the avalanche of new content resulting from cloud computing and services, virtualization, social networks, HD video and mobile platforms. HGST focuses on delivering innovative, customized storage solutions that are an integral part of a customer’s broader systems, infrastructure and application platforms ensuring a storage value proposition that addresses each customer use case and pain point. This consultative approach to storage coupled with technical expertise, a comprehensive customer support infrastructure, world-class operations and a broad portfolio of solutions sets a high standard for product and service excellence. Founded by the pioneers of hard drives in 2003, HGST became a separate and wholly owned subsidiary of Western Digital Corporation in March, 2012. HGST maintains its U.S. headquarters in San Jose, California and is marketed under the HGST brand name.

Just like with the SATA II version the SATA III version of the Ultrastar 7K4000 comes with a total of 64MB of data buffer, a rotational speed of 7200RPM, an very impressive MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) of 2.000.000 hours and is covered by a 5 year warranty. As always we will be testing the highest capacity model currently available which is the 4TB one just like the SATA II version we tested almost a month ago. Unfortunately this time over i was unable to secure a 2nd sample for RAID0 tests but since the main goal behind this entire comparison is to test and see if there are any real performance differences between the two models (SATA II/III) i think we can skip on RAID tests this time over. So time to find out if the same hard disk drive with SATA III connectivity is any better in terms of read/write performance than the same hard disk drive with SATA II connectivity.